Advice to read before buying a course from Udemy - <AUTHOR> https://www.labnol.org/internet/buying-udemy-courses/31851/ <comment><USER2> Keep in mind instructors don't really ever get paid 97% of their list price.

Let's say I give you a coupon to buy my course for $19. Technically I would receive 97% of that, but that never happens because Udemy constantly puts it up for $10 and as soon as you reach the course's description page you will see Udemy's "better" deal, and naturally you'll click that.

So instead of receiving 97% of $19 as an instructor, you'll end up with $5 (50% of $10 because you normally only get 50% revenue).

Also Udemy tries to push instructors to make 7-8+ hour video courses which could easily take 3 to 4 full time months to create.

Then of course they play favorites with certain instructors. For example it's not uncommon for Udemy to reach out to certain instructors and then go into a bounded contract with them which basically says "look, if you make a top quality course, we'll promote the shit out it for you. We'll even give you a direct internal contact and resources to help you make the best course possible for this niche." which essentially means if you're NOT part of this, it will be impossible to compete with someone who is because the biggest factor in ranking well is number of sales + number of positive reviews.

Long story short, I've spent a few years teaching on Udemy (and even made decent $ on it without any special treatment on Udemy) but I'm slowly trying to remove myself from them because of how poorly they treat instructors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Udemy rubs me the wrong way. When I see courses that are supposedly several hundred to several thousand dollars, constantly marked down to pennies on the dollar, that seems like a red flag. I've tried a few of the tech courses and in my experience, a lot of them are outdated or outright worthless. Their micro-certification courses are about as long as a news article. As someone else said, there's definitely some good courses thrown in, you just have to be able to find them.

<comment><USER4> I've thought the same thing and figured it's A/B tested to hell and just produces conversions. I know it's worked on me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I sell a poorly marketed (but well-loved) "Project-Based Linux" course on Udemy. Most of my business there comes from my YouTube channel. Since launching the course two years ago, the average price students have paid has hovered around just over $9.00.

I think of Udemy as the Packt of online course platforms. There are certainly some gems to be found, if you have the time to look for them and don't mind getting a few duds in the process.

<comment><USER6> Two points of context:

1\. I have a friend with a well performing Udemy course and he's doing about the same price/unit sale as you are. I think it's just a volume thing.

2\. Udemy courses are so inexpensive and as a result does it matter if there are a few duds? Again from the stats my friend shared, about 80% of the people buying the course don't even start it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that.

And just to clarify, I didn't mean to sound negative. I actually think it's a good thing -- I've picked up several really good courses on real estate investing, machine learning, and other stuff.

A few misses at $10/pop come out in the wash when you also get courses that can add tens of thousands of dollars' worth of knowledge to your life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _if you prefer proper instructor-led video courses, go with Udemy_

That's a bit of a stretch. There are plenty of video courses in EdX which are generally of a very high quality as they are produced by real institutions, with real lecturers, not random people off YouTube.

And EdX is free, you pay only for a certificate if you need/want one. With no pricing tricks based on web/app either.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought this was going to touch on how many Udemy courses are stolen.

<comment><USER9> Are there a lot?

Like people copying slides or such?

<comment><USER8> More like people reuploading entire courses.

> _in 2015, we have received 125 DMCA notifications as well as 45 "Hey, this > looks weird maybe you should look into this," notifications_

[https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from- pi...](https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from- piracy-5638b929ffca)

<comment><USER3> Interesting read, I didn't know anything about that. It seems like all would be solved if they put even a tiny bit of effort into vetting uploads. What type of educational site allows most any upload to make it through? They're approach seems to be reactive as compared to other sites being proactive, another red flag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think I've ever seen a udemy course NOT on sale.

<comment><USER10> Here's an interesting tidbit from my experience. My son was looking at purchasing a Udemy course. He was asking my advice about it as we chatted over the phone (he lives a short distance from me). I visited the site and found the course he was referring to. "Oh, the one for only $11.95?"

"No, it's $19.95"

After going back and forth for a moment we verified it was the same course, but for him it was offered at a higher price. He was using an Android phone to visit the site, and I was on a Linux box. He had never visited the site before searching for this course, and I had never heard of it.

The difference? Not exactly sure? Is it profiling based on OS? Doesn't seem likely. I suspect the price was based on cookie residue he picked up or profiling based on prior surfing. He had been searching the web for a while looking at similar products. Was his surfing behavior calculated into his price, scoring a more likely chance for him to purchase at a higher rate?

I have not yet found out (does anyone here have a reasonable explanation?), but it's a definite turn off to use any more of their products.

<comment><USER11> Pretty simple - new users get a cheaper price.

Mobile apps also won't match up, the prices are controlled by their own tier structures. e.g. $10.99 on a website might translate to 13 euros for a dude on the app in France.

<comment><USER12> > He had never visited the site before searching for this course, and I had > never heard of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every Udemy course I ever bought was on a massive sale, usually in excess of 90% or so. There's so many sales all the time nothing is worth buying at full price.

<comment><USER14> No course is ever on sale if every course is always on sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have used Udemy for programming and music courses. Some programming courses have been mediocre or outdated for sure but I have always looked back and noticed that it was my fault for not reading more about the current state of the subject and referenced that with the course description.

I've also used Coursera but i'm just not a fan of the online classroom approach nor do I care about the certifications but all the courses I have taken were awesome material-wise.

What I do know is if I ever meet Stephen Grider or Maximillian Schwarzmüller in a bar I will be buying them a beer.

</comment><comment><USER16> My assumption was always that the full price is only there to act as a starting point for negotiations with companies buying courses for employee training.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've bought a few courses from there and they've been great about refunds if I get into it and it's not what was expected.

My first experience was very good with a deep Mastering Ansible course that was released in March of this year and is totally up to date. Others have been a bit hit or miss, but I've had good luck trusting the highly rated ones.

<comment><USER18> Thats great about refunds and since I read the comments before the article on this I thought the article might about refunds.

Coursera had very poor service when I asked for a refund on a ~$500 course before the course actually began. Used to do heaps of free and paid courses online and that experience actually turned me off them completely...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Udemy is great for new or niche content.

If you want to learn data science or machine learning or python, go with Udacity, Coursera or EdX.

But if you want to learn VueJS, you have to use Udemy.

Best part is that the $1 million course was 90% off, so I only had to pay $100,000 for it! What a saving!

<comment><USER20> The VueJS 2 course[0] is 95% off right now, marked down to $10 from $190. I wonder if it displays that for everyone.

I'm sorry, Udemy, but that's a _suspiciously_ huge discount.

[0]: [https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-the-complete- guide/](https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-the-complete-guide/)

<comment><USER21> I have checked a couple of courses over the last months and they always offer 90% discount and only for a couple of days. But when the time expires, the discount gets automatically extended. So these 190$ are just a fiction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They have some decent-ish stuff but I only buy their courses at the price of about $9.99 and like another commenter said, the "full price" of hundreds to thousands of dollars is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER23> Would not recommend udacity for any reason. Their content is shallow and their certificates are one step above toilet paper.

</comment><comment><USER24> i like these advices, thanks a lot. it's useful and can save quite a bit if you enjoy this platform for your learning needs.

</comment><comment><USER25> off topic, but to my ear the "an" in the title is jarring. i've been wondering for a while now why "an" doesn't feel right before some words, even though i learned "an before words that start with a vowel."

turns out it's "an before words that __sound __like they start with a vowel" regardless of how they're spelled.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.usage.english/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/alt.usage.english/TB140YlzFqM)

<comment><USER26> This is a common grammatical mistake that I see made by folks from certain countries. Usually, it's using _an_ incorrectly before a word that starts with the letter _u_ but where the _u_ has a consonant _/ y/_ sound.

<comment><USER27> /j/ is the IPA for the English consonant "y" sound, /y/ is a vowel.

<comment><USER26> Sorry, I wasn't intending on using IPA. I've been teaching my kids using Logic of English, which is how that sound is represented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I get the marketing advantage of being able to say "90% off!" on your products and I guess that Udemy did their own A/B testing on that but when I discovered the website a few months ago it really made me think twice on the quality of the marketplace.

I bought a few courses since then and I don't regret it, it landed me a job, but the whole "eternal discount" thing really was a real turn off, how about just putting the right price from the beginning?

<comment><USER29> they actually tried a "normal" pricing model for a summer, but purchases dropped. very similar to the JC Penney price change. psychologically people like things on sale</comment></comment>


Hoodie – Fast web app development - <AUTHOR> http://hood.ie/ <comment><USER2> Giving full email privileges to the client is a terrible idea. Even if you do rate limiting, you're essentially allowing anyone to get your mail server(s) blacklisted and all future mail from anyone marked as spam.

In general, most people would be naturally apprehensive about federating their entire user authentication system through a third party. However, I suppose that by using hoodie you are supporting a group of people whose only job is to ensure security and fix vulnerabilities in your login system. It's also open- source, so you can vet it for yourself.

The JS library needs more work though - I could think of several basic use cases that it can't handle. It would also be great to see some full examples. Overall this is very cool stuff.

<comment><USER3> Hoodie doesn't provide any email privileges in it's core. There is an email plugin that does that, but it's just a showcase and we would not recommend to use that in a production app. The plugin is maybe 10 lines of code, you can easily use that as base and put all the security in it that you would do in a REST API as well.

I'd be also very interested in your basic use cases that you think Hoodie couldn't handle. It would certainly be great input for the project.

<comment><USER4> " _There is an email plugin that does that, but it 's just a showcase and we would not recommend to use that in a production app._"

You do realize that by putting it in your documentation, you're _encouraging people to use it_.

<comment><USER5> We also encourage people not to use Hoodie in production, yet :)

What @gr2m means: there is no reason Hoodie's mail feature would work any different from a traditional web app. At some point a server side will validate a client request, and if valid, translate that into sending an email (Gmail comes to mind). Hoodie's email plugin can do exactly that, except that today's implementation is a mere sketch of that, like other parts of Hoodie, that show what can be done, but aren't hardened against production use, yet. None of that means though that Hoodie behaves any differently from a security/abuse/DOS perspective than any other web app :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for confirming my crosspost :) However, as I was just saying, wouldn't it be nice to clearly see that we're talking 0.x directly on the website and not only when we install the npm package?

EDIT: Thanks for your answer, I am going to stop crossposting now :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you wonder how the synchronization works, it's currently using a custom solution which is built on top of local storage. However it seems[0] that they are planing to switch to the awesome Pouchdb[1].

[0]: [https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie.js/issues/8](https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie.js/issues/8)

[1]: [http://pouchdb.com/](http://pouchdb.com/)

<comment><USER8> I looked at pouchdb's website and there's a lot about browser support but I didn't see any docs about the data model. It seems you're expected to know how CouchDB works?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's a document database, uses UUIDs and revisions for identification and does HTTP-based P2P replication. In Hoodie we abstract that away in a simple to use `hoodie.store` object with the usual `add()`, `update(), `find()`, `findAll()` methods for operations. No need to know about the CouchDB/PouchDB specifics, just store your objects :)

<comment><USER8> Okay, but the key design decision in any data syncing library is how it resolves update conflicts. Is it last-one-wins, report an error and try again, diff merging, or maybe some kind of operational transform?

Since that's the heart of the problem being solved, it's weird when the docs leave it out.

<comment><USER5> Excellent point. We will make this more clear.

Conflicts are detected for you, like in version control systems. You need to resolve them yourself, or you can implement a server-wins/client-wins/last- write-wins scenario, if you want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know @gr2m, one of the guys behind Hoodie - he's one of the most awesome and holistic engineers I have met in my professional career! Also he's a regular speaker at conferences and devoting his time for charitable work.

If you don't have a backend ninja in your dev team, you should take a serious look into Hoodie!

<comment><USER10> Would you happen to know if there are any videos of his talks online?

<comment><USER9> There are probably videos. However, I do not have links.

But he was one of the speakers at re:publica[1] two weeks ago in Berlin as well as one of the moderators of the Global Innovation Lounge that was streamed by voicerepublic[2].

1\. [http://re-publica.de/user/2037/event/1](http://re- publica.de/user/2037/event/1)

2\. [https://voicerepublic.com/venues/196#archived- talks](https://voicerepublic.com/venues/196#archived-talks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Broken back button, bleh.

<comment><USER12> And you thought you were just scrolling... turns out you were navigating.

<comment><USER13> I wish we could stop calling things "broken" just because they work in a way that's well thought out but unconventional. How are we ever going to make progress on UI design if everyone immediately gets chastised for deviating from more orthodox web behavior by even the slightest amount?

EDIT: lbarrow is correct that the hash tag navigation is borked. I thought people were just complaining about navigation to a previous site on the same tab. I stand corrected, I fully agree it's broken.

<comment><USER14> This is clearly broken. You can't go back beyond the first part of the page you looked at. It doesn't work.

<comment><USER13> OK, I stand corrected, after further testing I agree the inter-page navigation doesn't work right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Team Hoodie here. Happy to answer any questions you might have :)

<comment><USER15> How exactly did you convince the IEDR to let you have hood.ie?

<comment><USER16> Well given that one of the hood.ie developers is called Caolan McMahon, I'm guessing there's an Irish granny involved somewhere ;-)

<comment><USER15> I was thinking that initially, but it looks to be a proxy registration with somebody else acting as the domain holder. The domain holder is 'Paul Campbell', who registered under the category "Discretionary Name" as a Sole Trader. I'm guessing there were some little fibs used to get the registration past the hostmasters... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So let's just deliver all our business logic as JavaScript to an entirely untrustworthy client! Whats the worst that could happen?

<comment><USER5> Hoodie works no different than Gmail. What's the worst that can happen there?

<comment><USER17> Well you sure as shit aren't going to see "hoodie.account.signUp(username, password);" in Gmail's client-side code.

Gmail's code base is not a "offline first, mobile first" platform. The API that is exposed to the client-side is fairly light (watch the traffic).

I highly suggest use research "business logic flaws" in web apps. Anything Jeremiah Grossman has said on this topic is good stuff.

<comment><USER18> Can you give an example for why that signup code is bad? In the case that I'm using Hoodie with CouchDB, wouldn't Hoodie just AJAX post a user document to the CouchDB _users database (which is a good implementation)? All of the access control would be in the hands of the server with minimal (if any at all) security logic in the front end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> looks cool on several levels: empowering people to build the things they want w/o being "1337", volunteer driven, a "noBackend"/"One Backend Per User" ([http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private- backend](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private-backend)) default for a freer internet, and named after one of the most versatile articles of clothing ever invented.

the hoodie-server repo clocks in at just under 3k lines of javascript, though. i mean, there are a bunch of plugins, and wc is far from the best metric, but it's the only one that i've time for while this is still near the top of the list, so i'll just ask:

is this whole project to be viewed more as kick-ass-but-still-in-progress codebase or more like a socio-political statement about what happens when you make creating a single user's experience the priority (vs. trying to roll out an app that could scale your user base while still managing to own all their data)?

anyway, it seems like some of each.

<comment><USER5> You basically nailed it :) — Hoodie is probably further along that it might seem. The team has been working on earlier iterations of this for nearly a decade now, and we have learned a lot along the way, allowing us to be very concise this time around. In addition, we have chosen a few powerful abstractions to make the actual implementation rather tiny.

That said, there is lots of work to be done, to make it, say, Rails, or Django-grade production ready, but the rough sketches are there and we are comfortable running a production app since December 2013, and we are working with a bunch of clients on their products, that we are comfortable with putting our reputation on the line for.

After 1.0 (we are pre), we want to be very explicit with the different levels of stability and maturity we ascribe to all parts of the system and the whole release overall. Our current production app handles 10k registered users on a small VPS without much sweat, so anywhere in that order of magnitude, with similar usage patterns, we thing Hoodie rocks the real-world, but if you are significantly diverging from this, we want to be careful and only recommend other's to rely on Hoodie, when we have reasonable first or second hand experience of similar scale and use.

As for the socio-political statement: that's definitely a big part of our motivation. We want to write and spread a story that isn't the usual idea-vc- flip-sunset / abuse-overworking-cheating horror stories. And freeing data and empowering users is a future we want to see, so we are building it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >It took less than 15 minutes for a person with no experience in any part of the stack to take an existing single user app and make it a multi-user application with robust security and data storage. […] Bravo, hood.ie, brav- fucking-o.

I find that extremely hard to believe.

<comment><USER21> >brav-fucking-o

I would have left that part out. Partly because it doesn't really roll off the tongue well, and partly because it comes across as hubris.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.xkcd.com/1290/](http://www.xkcd.com/1290/)

<comment><USER23> Wow, there really is a relevant xkcd for everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I didn't realize there there was a name for it. Nobackend. catchy. I use SharePoint server as a nobackend solution. All the apps I write are client- side JavaScript. User profiles, permissions, and authentication are left to SharePoint to deal with. I create lists, query and update them via web services provided out of the box. Even search is provided by a web service, so I don't have to worry about indexing content. All I have to do is build user- centric clients for dealing with the data. It's brilliant.

Hoodie sounds like a great generalization for that, in a public/non-corporate domain. Plus it has events for displaying data changes immediately. What's not to like?

</comment><comment><USER25> We're working on a similar no-backend product called Hoist that does most of what Hoodie is but is a hosted solution. We do all the 'server' work so you can just build your app. We provide API's for everything from Data management (just post and get JSON) and user management. We're also working on integrating other cloud company API's so you can quickly get hooked up to them (and do the auth with tokens) on the server side and then use their API's in a fully client-side app.

Check it out: [http://hoistapps.com](http://hoistapps.com)

Would love to hear what anyone thinks if you give it a go. I can be emailed on firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER26> Hood.ie is open source, and your code is not. Any chance you can open source your code?

<comment><USER25> Our client library is entirely open source, but our platform itself is not as it's a commercial no-backend offering. This allows us to offer production- grade hosting for these types of no-backend apps.

<comment><USER27> Many companies offer production-grade hosting for open source applications. The fact that you are keeping your source closed tells me that you are afraid a competitor (or your clients themselves) could achieve an equivalent quality of hosting for less than they would pay you. To a customer like me, this is bad news.

<comment><USER25> We absolutely think that open sourcing code is important, but not just a giant lump of all of it; a mountain of code not always useful.

It's still early days for us but we are considering open sourcing reusable parts of our platform or allowing people to host their own if they wish, but we haven't yet decided on which we will pursue yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interestingly enough this is a very similar business model to GetAngular, where AngularJS originated, a few years ago.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20100413141437/http://getangular....](http://web.archive.org/web/20100413141437/http://getangular.com/)

More details: [http://www.niden.net/2009/12/world-with-part-1-reviewhow- to....](http://www.niden.net/2009/12/world-with-part-1-reviewhow-to.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> So this appears to essentially be a Parse-like service that's self-hostable? Interesting.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Plus it's self-extandable, too. And expect many hoodie hosting providers popping up in the future, if you don't want that hassle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So I'm looking at their "Account" api, and I wonder if something similar like that exists for node just for the backend.

<comment><USER31> Not really the same, but Passport offers easy account authentication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Moving from a request based business logic to data based business logic (processing incoming data, as opposed to processing incoming http requests) is an interesting shift. Does anyone know what this kind of system is called? I'd love to do more research.

<comment><USER5> Heya @reconbot, I don't know if this specific system has a name, but it is something akin to a messaging bus, where clients and servers just exchange messages, if they have a network connection. Messages can carry raw data (a user record), or intents (send this email), and both sides agree on what to do with certain types of messages. Hope this helps! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How does this compare/contrast to Meteor?

<comment><USER28> Hoodie provides a backend for you, you manage the browser.

Meteor (and Derby etc) is a full stack JS setup, where you manage both the browser and node.

Both do data sync.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I suppose it's better than "Bro"...

</comment><comment><USER35> I guess this means that the sample web app no longer breaks if it's kept running for 15 minutes? Or is that problem still around?

<comment><USER5> Not that we are aware of. Could you please open an issue at [https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie- server/issues/new](https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-server/issues/new), and post your error messages? We're happy to help

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As discussed before here on hn ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514284)), this seems like a great successor (or at least a well-maintained alternative) to CouchApps and Kanso. I will definitively give it a try once PouchDB becomes a dependency :)

</comment><comment><USER36> I suspect this is in the documentation, but I'll ask here anyways: what does Hoodie do with the browser-cached data when a user signs out? Is it entirely removed from the local machine, or does it persist so the user can login while the machine is still offline?

(I suspect there is an attack vector there, though I've not looked into it at all.)

<comment><USER5> The default is keeping the data, but app devs can implement a pruning method as well, to make things suitable for shared browsers and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not sure if it's just me, but I think this site hijacks my 'back' button. I'm trying to get a recreate but I'm having some trouble.

Will report back shortly.

</comment><comment><USER38> Just realized .ie is an excellent TLD for cute website names

<comment><USER15> Less than you might think. It's not a trivial matter to get an .ie domain. The IEDR's rules make things difficult if you can't either (a) demonstrate a connection with Ireland the reviewer will accept or (b) demonstrate that you trade in the Irish market. There are ways around some of their rules, such as getting a registered business name from the CRO, but it really is a pain in the backside.

I write this as somebody who works for one of the biggest .ie registrars.

<comment><USER39> Isn't creating an Irish company relatively easy (if you are in EU)? I guess its a fair amount of work and cost to get a nice name if you dont want a company...

<comment><USER15> Comparatively speaking, yes, but they're registered in Germany, so that wouldn't fly. It looks like they used a proxy registrant and some well placed fibs to acquire the domain name, which is one of the more dicey ways to go about it as the IEDR aren't afraid to pull registrations.

Much safer and saner is to get a Registered Business Name number from the CRO. It doesn't cost much, you have it practically forever, and it's possible for private citizens and foreign corps to get them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very nice tool, quite convenient .. having just picked up a MeteorJS requirement for a project, this looks like a nice distraction. ;)

<comment><USER3> please ping us if you have any questions! twitter.com/hoodiehq

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Getting .ie domains is a pain in the ass. Tons of great domain hacks there but requires a physical presence in Ireland. Good work.

</comment><comment><USER42> Nice.but the website i see only source code. so kinda confuse how large system can build fast by noob.

</comment><comment><USER43> I see you can add , update data to the db using javascript...is it using nodejs?

<comment><USER5> End users only ever see JavaScript in the frontend. Some backend heavy lifting is done in Node and developers can extend that writing plugins in Node as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seems like I should've seen this on the latest episode of Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER45> Didn't appjet (yc 20xx) try this same idea a few years ago?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it looks like the target audiences squarely overlap.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppJet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppJet) doesn't look like it had a focus on offline-first. And Hoodie is not a hosted platform but an Open Source project more akin to Rails.

In addition, Hoodie is not interested in VC and flipping to Google later ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Couldn't find the example link? Is there one?

<comment><USER5> There are API samples further down the main page on [http://hood.ie](http://hood.ie)

[https://github.com/zoePage/hoodie-drawing](https://github.com/zoePage/hoodie- drawing) is an example app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> You guys should take a look at [http://github.com/EGreg/Q](http://github.com/EGreg/Q)

Not released yet -- but if someone has PHP / JS / PhoneGap skillz and wants to work with us, you can be an early member of the community.

<comment><USER48> In case you were unaware, there's a very popular and lovely promises library for javascript named q.

[https://github.com/kriskowal/q](https://github.com/kriskowal/q)

<comment><USER47> Yes I am aware of it. I also like it a lot. The Q Platform is able to interoperate with that Q library as well as with Angular, etc.

There are also several languages named Q. I don't think "Q Platform" is the same thing as a promises framework. It's not even for Javascript only. So why downvote the platform because there is something named similar to it?

Another example: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_authorization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_authorization)

[https://dev.twitter.com/docs/oauth/xauth](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/oauth/xauth)

[https://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/postini/doc...](https://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/postini/docs/admin/en/admin_ee_cu/authen_xauth.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get your layout for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm begin busy with a startup (for now just in Holland). My daily life is about begin a developer for a company, and wanting to do something besides my work. But I suck at making a layout for my webapplication. I've seen various great layouts from a lot of startups here at HN, buy how do you get your designs?<p>Are you creating it by yourself? Do you have friends who makes them for you? And do you have any tips for getting me my layout for my startup? <comment><USER2> Buy one. Get a free one. It doesn't matter if it's pretty, just get one to get started. Use 99designs.com and crowdsource it.

Best of luck in your endeavor. But the #1 skill that you need to launch a startup is resourcefulness. If you're having trouble doing the most basic of tasks (finding a layout for your site), then you may want to look for a cofounder with some complementary skills, so that you don't have to reach for the basics.

Whether you go solo or in pairs, you should try working at the skill of being resourceful. Take this as your first test: how quickly/cheaply can you get a skeleton site up?</comment>


Browser Based Responsive Wireframing Tool (open source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifeishao.com/rwdwire/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's open source as well <https://github.com/howlowck/rwdwire>

Created by Hao Luo</comment>


How a data scientist hacked Jeopardy - <AUTHOR> http://quantifiedself.com/2011/09/roger-craig-on-knowledge-tracking/

<comment><USER2> This is my HN Hyperbolic Title award winner of the week. He "hacked" jeopardy by finding an effective way to study/prepare himself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since the site is down, here is the Google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vTGEJRI...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vTGEJRIXazIJ:quantifiedself.com/2011/09/roger- craig-on-knowledge-tracking/+&cd=1&hl=es&ct=clnk)

</comment><comment><USER4> He won on Friday and he's in the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions Finals Monday (tomorrow) and Tuesday.</comment>


Seagate Technology to cut about 6,500 jobs; stock jumps 22% - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-seagate-job-cuts-20160712-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> How does this affect Seagate's downwards trending quality?

I got this kind of impression from Backblaze durability statistics, personal experiences have also been bad lately.

I do remember time when Seagate meant quality, but that ended when they bought Maxtor.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "The restructuring is expected to cost the company about $164 million in > pre-tax charges during fiscal 2017, $82 million of which will be employee > termination costs"

$82000000/6500 = $12615

Average severance of 12.6k per employee seems rough.

<comment><USER4> Maybe if all of the cuts were in the Bay Area. However the article suggests it's the "manufacturing footprint" in Asia that will be most affected.

Potentially that's not a very bad severance.

<comment><USER5> I read somewhere that Thailand is currently the world's largest hard drive manufacturer. It is therefore entirely possible that a substantial number of these job cuts with be in Thailand which definitely has dramatically lower salaries than the Bay Area.

source on the Thailand and HDs for those that are interested. This article from 2011 claims that 25% of global HD assembly is in Thailand. [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f0f9a234-fb33-11e0-8756-00144feab4...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f0f9a234-fb33-11e0-8756-00144feab49a.html#axzz4EGilmMS5)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is the stock up following news of a layoff?

(Honest question, I'm clueless about the financial market)

<comment><USER7> Because it is a cost cutting measure they are assuming that after the layoffs the company will be selling just as much product but will have 6,500 less salaries to pay making them more profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, that's a really huge number of jobs; hopefully everyone lands on their feet.

<comment><USER9> They won't, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to know more, I suggest checking out this site:

[https://www.thelayoff.com/seagate- technology](https://www.thelayoff.com/seagate-technology)

People at my company had said they don't lay people off. I found otherwise on thelayoff, so I check it periodically to see if there's anything to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is possible that like Foxconn, they are depending more on robots for their manufacturing. Perhaps they're preparing themselves to be bought out.</comment>


Apple Reports Third Quarter Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/07/23Apple-Reports-Third-Quarter-Results.html

<comment><USER2> Surprising that iPad sales are down about 14% from a year ago. But I guess the release of the 3rd gen iPad in March last year heated that quarter up a bit. This quarter was 6-9 months into the release cycle.

I have been expecting iPad sales to accelerate, and yet they seem fairly linear. Not sure if Android is seeping into the market, or if people are just clinging to their laptops more fervently than I thought they would.</comment>


Equality and Governmental Responsibility - <AUTHOR> http://jangosteve.com/post/491779976/equality-and-governmental-responsibility <comment><USER2> Counterpoints:

1\. Redistribution of resources: Only so much of the wealth created by natural resources is reasonable to privatize

2\. Redistribution of jobs: Some factory and service jobs are great and or pay well...but not many. Layoffs are sometimes a necessary step, but they are also a redistribution of wealth

3\. Profiteering: Providing low value while acting as a gatekeeper is the source of much wealth. We generally must live with that disparity, but this is a well known redistribution and one that is recognized for it's negative effects on economies

4\. Redistribution of power: We can argue all we want about whether Bush was a great president, or whether the American Senate is a beneficial institution, but like it or not they are both clearly getting that power from their hereditary wealth

5\. Redistribution of equality: This follows on from power. Why is the Senate mostly men? Why are American presidents all men so far? Why are most senior business leaders men? White? Straight? Root causes please. It's called a patriarchy, and we must tax wealth to bring some balance and help fix some of the ills caused, as well as to reduce the ability to purchase too much inequality (I'm a white male).

</comment><comment><USER3> We don't actually have a graduated income tax in this country -- even before you get into shenanigans like creative deductions and offshore accounting.

FICA taxes and medicare taxes, adding up to 15% or so, only apply to your first 100k or so of income. So if you're making 500k, you're probably paying less in taxes as a % of your income than your secretary.

Just wanted to point that out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what you mean... the US very much does have a graduated, or progressive, income tax schedule.

<comment><USER4> ...tainted a bit by tax cuts?

<comment><AUTHOR> ...absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As it was said already, higher does not mean higher productivity. In fact often lower productivity. Another point : inequality in any society is a bad thing. People live shorter lives, more crime e.tc., in short more misery. There is a new book, called "the spirit level" talking about the issue. So concentration of money in hands of not many creates unwanted side-effect: concentration of power. If you are a middle class person you should be really upset, when power to make decision, to influence future is being transferred from you to upper class.</comment>


OpenCL Programming Webinar Series - <AUTHOR> http://developer.amd.com/zones/OpenCLZone/Events/pages/OpenCLWebinars.aspx

<comment><USER2> I appreciate the effort, but I would be happy if I could only download a .ogv/.mp4 file. I honestly don't understand why these "presentations" and "webminars" use these crappy delivery mechanisms.

<comment><USER3> I would guess that they're produced by companies that are used to giving in- person seminars, and are trying to translate that as directly as possible to a new medium, regardless of whether or not that is actually a good idea.

<comment><USER4> A webinar allows the public the opportunity to interact and partially direct the presentation. Although there should be a video recording of it afterwards.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Findr, an omegle like chat made with Node.js, socket.io and angularJS - <AUTHOR> http://findr.mybluemix.net/ <comment><USER2> My partner made their name '<script>alert("xss");</script>'

Good effort but didn't work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Short story: I gave this a try not expecting much. I got matched with a person named "Lenny". The conversation started off fairly straight forward:

>Lenny: hello there

>hnperson: whats up

>Lenny: How are you doing today?

>hnperson: Not bad, yourself?

>Lenny: I'm doing beautifully

Having tried all the features I wanted to try, I was ready to end the conversation and get on with my work when Lenny asked:

>Lenny: I'm a recruiter for Facebook.

>Lenny: Are you happy with your current work?

This was a bit of a pleasant surprise, as I just entered the interview process with a few companies including Google and was planning to reach out to FB sometime today.

Unfortunately, before we were able to exchange contact info, Lenny left the chat in the middle of typing (presumably an accident?). I just wanted to share my Tuesday morning experience, and if Lenny is out there, I'd love to continue the conversation! If not, thanks for sharing this Show HN :)

<comment><USER4> Just had three disconnects in 5 minutes in different chats while people were typing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird and sorry to hear. Could be due to them being on mobile and leaving their internet app. Have not experienced this otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chatted with a few. Everything was going well until I said "Are you here from HN?". I was greeted with "Your chat partner has left".

<comment><USER6> I was on with Cloudy who wanted to know if it was open source. I said not sure and then s/he disconnected !

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Chatted with Jesus. Short conversation, guess he's a busy guy. Nice tool though, well done.

</comment><comment><USER8> Fun chat app, Joakim. Tried it out for a bit and chatted with a nice person for a few minutes.

As others have said, some minor scrolling things. Two other tiny bits:

* Words wrap around in the middle of the word rather than getting moved to the next line, so it's not very 'pretty'.

* When your chat partner is typing, it fluctuates too easily from 'x is typing...' and 'you are chatting with x' in the middle of their conversation. Maybe set the timeout for that message to be a little higher?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your input, appreciate it. The word wrapping is a problem that is now fixed. Maybe a longer timeout is a good idea, but I think a too long timeout would be confusing? Maybe the user only writes something and then deletes it and it will look like as if he/she is typing for 3 seconds?

<comment><USER8> The nice thing about seeing 'x is typing...' is that you know they have read your message and have begun to respond. I think a lot of movement from 'typing' to not is more distracting than anything. When I'm in a conversation, I really just want to know that my chat partner has read my message and is trying to respond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool chat! Fast!

Somethings that I saw:

1\. Horizontal scrolling is a bit boring (when you text a long message)

2\. Automatic Vertical scrolling is not always working

But it still awesome :-) congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have noticed. Really annoying to not be able to make these changes without disconnecting all current users..

<comment><USER9> Humm why they get disconnected?

Because you do a node refresh on the server on every Git Push?

You could make 2 repos to avoid that: frondend + backend

Then you could update frontend without disconecting users... On backend update you'll still get this issue of disconecting on Git pushs, there is no fast- and-easy solution, I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Besides the chat stopped working, chatting with a random HN member / developer was a very nice experience.

Does HN have a IRC channel ?

<comment><USER11> I had a very nice chat with a fellow developer from NL, which was fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Chatted with a fellow HN user from Germany! It was nice chat to make my day :) Peace!

</comment><comment><USER13> It is worth noting that this kind of chat is fundamentally vulnerable to MitM attack: anyone can just open two chat windows and copy all messages from one to the other and vice versa, even by hands or using browser automation.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would I tackle this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just had a good chat with "myself". I learned a lot about myself.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's the first time i've got to know some people from HN. Awesome.I hope it stays popular and becomes self-fueling. Is there some place else where HN people chat(other than HN itself)?

<comment><USER16> I look forward to seeing the answer to this on the FP tomorrow :D

<comment><USER15> fingers crossed! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HTTPS?

<comment><USER18> HTTPS should just work. Just add s to http in the URL. You can expect a cert issued to IBM. Background on my blue mix:

[https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2014/06/introducing- myblue...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2014/06/introducing-mybluemix- net-new-domain-application/)

Mods, can someone please change the submission URL to HTTPS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 'word-break: normal;' would be a good backup to 'break-word' which is not actually working. Also, why do I need to reenter my name every time?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, it is a bit weird. The only point is that it makes you less willing to end a conversation.. But really i was just lazy/not thinking about it. Putting it on The list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks great! Simple and just works. How long did it took to get this done? I've been thinking to just make something like this to learn node and socket.

<comment><AUTHOR> I started making it maybe.. thursday? I had previous knowledge in node.js and a bit of knowledge in socket.io (did the tutorial) but this project was a perfect way to learn some more socket.io and also angularJS for me:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool and smooth app, got nice chat with Dan. Good luck.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Will restart the server in 5 minutes.. i hope you finish chatting. I am introducing a way to broadcast messages as ADMIN so that I can prepare you!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for all the comments! I've had a great time chatting with some of you. New features will be added:)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is really cool. I might use this sort of stack for building my ideal, 2-player, deep collaboration app.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this open source? or are you planning to make it a business?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not plannning to make it a business. And even if so, I wouldn't forbid anyone to use my code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks good, any github?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's on github now:

[https://github.com/mrkickling/findrchat](https://github.com/mrkickling/findrchat)

<comment><USER24> Looks like this is your first project on Github; impressive stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not bad at all.. a few problems with the scrolling though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware. Will make changes when there is less people on:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Found some people to chat, mostly from here which is cool.

Hi, Jason

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Restarting the server now..

<comment><USER27> Are you running the app on the free plan of bluemix?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an internship at IBM atm so I get to use 2gb of space for 200 days or something. I don't know what's included in the free plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I Made a chat in 2 hours for communicating with GPRS devices. It's not hard anymore

<comment><USER29> Great job :) care to share? No reason to be snarky towards others.

<comment><USER28> It currently contains proprietary code. But there will be a later version open sourced.

I didn't mean to be snarky though, in my eyes, it was just a fact

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If it supported video and used github logins, it could be a site where you can bounce ideas off other users. maybe stop github users without repos to use it to prevent nudity.

<comment><USER31> It's trivial to fork or create some random thing using just web UI, and since you are already registering at GitHub, this wouldn't be that effective,I think.</comment></comment>


Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32252-3/fulltext <comment><USER2> The findings of the article run contrary to the conventional wisdom that eating fat is bad for you:

> _High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total > mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to > lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with > cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease > mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke. > Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these > findings._</comment>


Ask HN: Why Use Social Media Logins? - <AUTHOR> The general consensus is: It is so much easier!  You or your users can login in seconds without having to type in your email or username and try to remember the password. Sounds like a great thing. Social media sounds like it could be the answer to all of our login problems.<p>[continued below] <comment><AUTHOR> As a "user", I love logging in with social media. How awesome is it that I can just click a button and be logged in instantly? No worrying about setting up a password, at least, for most websites. I used to not trust it, but after becoming a developer and learning: it is just grabbing an email or a name is not too bad. Though sometimes, it may grab more than that, such as your friends list, etc. Somehow, that became okay and no one cares.

As a "developer", things are quite different. There are a few libraries of code on Github and you can find examples across the Internet. For the most part, these examples do work after you have set up some API backend on the social media platforms themselves.

Code would almost seem straightforward. However, it is not always the case, especially, when a social media platform is ever-changing. For example, last week, someone released a new product on Hacker News and went about his way, only to realize, that people were attempting to login to Facebook, which recently upgraded from SDK 4 to SDK 5. Massive changes occurred. How embarrassing to go live, only for one of your social media buttons not to work? It's not his fault, but it's Facebook who updated their code so older versions no longer work. Most developers are trying to focus on their own code and make sure it works. Now they have to worry about potential users being unable to access the front door?

When I went to update Facebook SDK 4 to SDK 5 on one of my own platforms, using Facebook's very example that they provided. I couldn't get it to work. I ended up removing Facebook from my registration and login screen. The three that remained were Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

After some careful testing with these three, they work for the most part, except occasionally, if someone logs into Google, and then tries to login again real fast, such as your code not remembering them and keeping them logged in, Google's token expires and it won't auto-generate a new one, and it creates a problem, an error that you can't even catch, so your users are exposed to seeing that error.

Twitter, too, seems to have some issues. Using the examples you can easily find on the Internet, and I'm no genius when it comes to this stuff, but I managed to copy some code, put it together, and make it work with my database, this would also come with problems: It keeps looping and acquiring a new oauth token without ever going back to my website with the information. After spending nearly an hour trying to figure out what the problem was and scouring the Internet with very few answers, I gave up. So Twitter has now been removed.

LinkedIn is my last resort, but to offer only one option: is it better at all?

The purpose of social media logins was to making logging in easier, but none of these social media platforms have beginner or even novice developers in mind. If any of the code was to change while your web application is live, than you are screwed, trying to come up with a patch for it. Lest, you might not even find out until someone actually reports it that your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google login isn't working. How would you know otherwise, since you probably might only use one or none?

I sought to find out: Do we really need to use social media logins? In this day and age, it is supposedly expected. For the most part, researching claims, there is a 60% usage of social media login buttons. But are they necessary? I came across another article from a developer at MailChimp which makes a great point about social logins: while people use them, if people like your application or find it useful, they are going to register and login with a username or email address, regardless of whether you have social media or not.

Here is the article: [https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent- worth-...](https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/)

Navigating to MailChimp's registration and login page: there is no social media presence.

So I know there are some attempts at making life easier for developers out there, such as Hybridauth Social Login PHP Library ( [https://hybridauth.github.io/](https://hybridauth.github.io/) ), which may do a good job, but I've not used it yet. There are also other non-free solutions out there in which you pay for a script or a web company to handle it all for you. This too, might be good, but why? Why isn't it easier for developers to set up social media buttons?

Maybe it is security concerns or whatever, but you would think that as large as these social media platforms are, they'd be better at giving you the email and username or whatever you need.. and making it easier. After all, it is technically free branding for them that you put on your website.

Anyone else struggle with social media login or just give up completely or maybe you found a really easy solution that grants you peace of mind?</comment>


More Spanish than Russians,English or Irish,know what is causing climate change - <AUTHOR> http://localhost.kyso.io:3000/helenadomo/more-spainiars-know-what-is-causing-climate-change-vs-people-from-russia-uk-norway-or-ireland <comment><AUTHOR> Data from the 2016 European Social Survey. Asking the question of  "What is causing climate change? Natural processes, human activity, or both? the source of the data is here [https://twitter.com/ESS_Survey/status/1011206149817978881/ph...](https://twitter.com/ESS_Survey/status/1011206149817978881/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1011206149817978881&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmagnet.xataka.com%2Fpreguntas- no-tan-frecuentes%2Festo-solo-pasa-espana-16-estadisticas-que-nos-colocan-a- cabeza-mundo-temas-cruciales)

</comment><comment><USER2> Not strange, as desertification, already underway and well-known by residents, will change large parts of the country according to climate models.

There is a Ministry of Environment, which in the Spanish original name is called "Ministry of Ecological Transition" [ to a decarbonised economy ].</comment>


Blame one security lapse on "open source software"? Surely not - <AUTHOR> https://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2017/june/data-protection-fine-shows-security-risks-from-using-open-source-software-cannot-be-ignored-says-expert/ <comment><AUTHOR> More silliness, comparing apples with bananas, of course you will find more open source vulnerabilities that doesn't explain the reality of security breaks are higher with proprietary s/w (wanncry anyone?) [http://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-software- management...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-software-management- falls-behind-security-concerns/)</comment>


Spawn of Groupon  - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2280963/pagenum/all

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting perhaps because of its naivete; takes as part of its thesis, "Group coupons are nothing but a souped-up iteration of a very old phenomenon: Plain old coupons date back to the 19th century, if not earlier". This seems (unless I'm crazy) totally wrong. Classic coupons have purposes beyond promotion; for instance, capitalizing on price insensitivity. Classic coupons rarely offer huge discounts, or, if they do, they do it for a loss-leader product (and they do it infrequently).

Groupons offer huge discounts for a business' core offering for the sole purpose of attracting new customers. They're purely a promotion mechanism. They're a big deal not because coupons needed modernizing, but because they're a means for local businesses to cut out a middleman in promotional costs and spend that money directly on prospective customers.

Also, it's hard to take seriously a competitive analysis that doesn't recognize the network effects of group coupon sites; it's a winner-take-most market with a capital-intensive customer acquisition model (they're doing direct sales to tens of thousands of local businesses).</comment>


My Journey From Blindness to Building a Fully Conversational User Interface - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/war-stories-my-journey-from-blindness-to-building-a-fully-conversational-user-interface-5ffb74a74c6d#.h3omid6a4 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11210904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11210904).</comment>


2048 with Leaderboard and achievements, with Kivy (Python/OpenGL) - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meltingrocks.kivy2048

<comment><USER2> There is an official version of this game by the game creator:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gabriele.cirul...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gabriele.cirulli.puzzle)

It is very smooth to play and it does have a leaderboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no official version, as the author said: [https://twitter.com/gabrielecirulli/status/44449813553323212...](https://twitter.com/gabrielecirulli/status/444498135533232128)

The link your sent is by the way slower than the gl version :)

<comment><USER3> Not sure why you're being downvoted, there is no official version at the moment and that is an impersonator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't imagine in my wildest dreams how many clones of this game are in store. Is it possible that every developer with any amount of skill just went to make their own version of clone?

<comment><USER5> The 1024/2048 games are themselves clones of Threes: [http://asherv.com/threes/](http://asherv.com/threes/)

Threes is doing really well in the app stores right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> After having played the original 2048 on my laptop, I wanted to play it on my Android phone as well. There was no official app, so a quick search led me to purchase the slightly different but decent "Fives".

Then I realized the original 2048 was actually playable on my phone's browser.

I haven't played "Fives" since.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good job but it feels slow on my (quite fast) HTC One. It's also a bit different from the web version in that you can keep playing even after getting the 2048 block, which I like.

<comment><USER8> You can keep playing on the "official" one too. (Recent update.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are at least 4 versions of 2048 on the play store already.

<comment><USER10> I saw at least 10. I had to scroll quite always to find this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> pretty sweet that this is done in less than 300 loc of python! [https://github.com/tito/2048](https://github.com/tito/2048)

<comment><USER12> Which with the framework, compiles to more than 7 megs of code. Which is a lot to download for a mobile phone on an overloaded 3g network in many parts of the world. It is better than a cross-platform framework like regal though, which is probably triple the size.

Pandora, Pinterest, Yahoo Mail, Tumblr etc. are all smaller sized apps. Because small on mobile is currently important. Cross-platform frameworks which handle OpenGL ES tend to be bulky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> man, the hacker scene is so petty. ripping each other off just to show they can (or worse, to profit). sure imitation is flattering, but where's the dignity?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no ads, donations goes to Gabriel, i thank him in everyway i can when publishing. He said he wont do an ios/android App. There is nothing petty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Silently quits on Nexus 4 :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Even after a restart? Would you have a chance to share the log (if you know how to do it)

<comment><USER14> weirdly, if I show the open apps, it's there, but if I try to switch to it it just jumps back to the 'desktop'.

Yeah, tried multiple times, even killed the app and retried. Same result.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somebody on reddit said it was using ART and crash. Without it it work. Try without it maybe? I didn't got a chance to test a Kivy application with ART yet.

<comment><USER14> Ah yeah I'm using ART. It takes 30 min to rebuild everything for Dalvik, bit too much effort when I'm out and about. Unlucky! Usually most apps work fine under ART.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Crashes on a 4096.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed in 1.2.0, should be up on Google Play soon. I've added it as a achievement by the way, You're a real master.</comment></comment>


Source code for J language is available under GPL 3 - <AUTHOR> http://jsoftware.com/source.htm

<comment><USER2> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2278339></comment>


Electrons don't think - <AUTHOR> https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html?spref=tw <comment><USER2> >Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change.

The crux of the argument seems to be here, and is simply a fallacious equivalency of free will/agency and consciousness. Two different philosophical issues that may have a unifying explanation, but not for now.

Besides, panpsychism seems to almost be tautological in its assertions: if we accept materialism, and we accept consciousness exists in some creatures, then where else would consciousness be "realized" in aggregate except distributed amongst the actual matter of the brain, down reductivly to sub-atomic particles? That doesn't mean it's a fully formalized robust theory, but the concepts underlying it are sound.

<comment><USER3> No, that's crazy. It takes lots of atoms of iron and silicon to make a Boeing 747, but that doesn't mean that a single iron atom has even the slightest amount of "plane-ness".

<comment><USER4> Demanding "plane-ness" is the mistake here: you're throwing in a kind of glib idealism. If instead you demand "the possibility of forming lots and lots of electron bonds in a shape capable of performing flight" then the iron atoms did "have an amount" of the property necessary for being a plane.

<comment><USER3> I suppose if you define "conscious" in that way-- "this atom/electron/whatever has the _possibility_ to be part of a system that thinks/reasons/feels/perceives"\-- then yeah, panpsychism is vacuously true. But that's a wild abuse of the word "conscious" that is nothing like the its understood meaning: if nothing is not conscious, then the word is meaningless. When we try to define consciousness, we're obviously looking for the "thing" which we have but rocks and water molecules plainly don't. If you don't want "consciousnesses" to be the word for that thing, fine, but serious people are just going to ignore you, invent a new word for the thing, and carry on the original search.

And when I talk to panpsychists, I get the distinct sense that they know this and they're learning on it, and by doing so they're motte-and-baileying everyone else. They start out by saying that "electrons have consciousness", with the unspoken implication that consciousness means the popularly- understood ability to reason and plan and have subjective experience, even if they won't say so. And then when someone scientifically-minded comes along and points out that that's absurd, they retreat to a new definition of consciousness that is true but pointless. We're trying to really solve the hard problem here, not handwave it away and declare victory.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm not a serious person, but I don't think "consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan" is part of the common understanding of this term, and a lot of what you wrote seems like a "no true Scottsman" to me. And actually, really defining well what is meant by "consciousness" seems to be a big part of the challenge.

> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here

This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me panpsychism is basically an _intuition_ for why the "problem of consciousness" may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What an unnecessarily divisive post. Science is not antithetical to philosophy, and physicists and philosophers aren't two different camps. As someone with an education in physics, I had a physics professor who also wrote lovely articles in the subject of philosophy of science.

I don't doubt philosophers without education in the fundamentals of physics can and often do come to conclusions that are naive and hopelessly incompatible with physical evidence or models that have stood the test of time for centuries. Especially quantum mechanics is a widely misunderstood and misapplied subject. But it goes both ways, it is quite arrogant to think you can disprove an entire subject in a field of study that isn't your own with such simple reasoning.

It is true that electrons don't have a lot of internal state and can be completely described with a few quantum numbers. But my first reaction wouldn't be to conclude that panpsychism is obvious nonsense (not that I'm a fan either, I'm have no problem confessing my ignorance on the subject), but to see if someone more qualified in the topic had written something about it.

</comment><comment><USER7> This definition of consciousness, that there is some internal state that can change based on input, and changing this internal state leads to different behavior, is problematic. So is a definition that defines consciousness as responding to identical stimuli in different ways.

The whole problem is that consciousness as a concept is poorly defined. I do not think the people the believe inanimate objects have "consciousness" believe consciousness necessitates thought, or even internal state.

</comment><comment><USER8> This post seems to try and refute really technical philosophy with simplified to the point of being wrong science.

It just seems awkward as a result.

But thinking really simplified science is enough to completely dismiss other serious thinkers is why scientists get called closed minded: to use their parlance, this rant isn't even wrong.

<comment><USER9> Eh, probably Hossenfelder found some popular account of panpsychism that did in fact argue that electrons have some sort of independent consciousness, maybe even written by a philosopher. In fact, I spot just the argument she refuted being stated as a reply elsewhere in these comments, preceded by the words "She misses the point".

In any event, what exactly is simplified to the point of being wrong? That more internal states effects cross sections?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Look, I'm not asking electrons to think outright; but reading a bit of the schematic would be nice.

<comment><USER11> I don't know about you, but all of my electrons diabolically thwart my every effort to contain or direct them, especially at higher frequencies. Petulant little bastards those electrons...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a well written and educational article, but it's also missing the point. For a dualist, no amount of material testing is going to determine a spiritual/ideal/pickyourlabel characteristic.

Even if you hold the dualist position there's nothing here to disagree with.

Sadly she didn't address a question that's interested me since reading Feynman's QED: how do electrons "decide" how to scatter?

Edit: I'm going to bookmark this to use as a virtually perfect example of not even wrong.

</comment><comment><USER13> Author confuses thinking, and ability to act with consciousness the hard problem. If you want to debate with philosophers, you must be ready to dig deep into definitions.

When physicists use dabble with philosophy, run.

Even philosophers (like Dave Chalmers) can't explain their thinking in detail in podcasts or popular articles. They just put some ideas there but it does not represent the analytical thinking well.

</comment><comment><USER14> of course electrons don't think! they are merely the chaff and dross thrown off by the _real_ movers and thinkers in the universe, which are monads[0].

 _" Just when one is about to judge Liebniz as having the strangest mind of anyone who ever lived, one remembers Newton and his lifelong obsession with alchemy and his strenuous efforts to predict the exact date of the End of the World by ransacking the Book of Revelations for encrypted clues"_[1]

[0]: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/)

[1]: [http://faculty.cord.edu/andersod/Stephenson- Metaphysics.pdf](http://faculty.cord.edu/andersod/Stephenson-Metaphysics.pdf)

</comment><comment> jf- The author misses the point. Panpsychism is in part a response to the hard problem of consciousness, the question of how subjective experience arises from non-experiencing matter. If consciousness at some basic, low level is instead a property of matter, the issue stops being a difference of kind and starts being one of degree: consciousness is an organisation of a property that already exists in the components, so it need not _arise_ at all.

Consciousness and thought are also separate things. The seeing of the colour red or touching a rough surface are experiences, though neither could be described as thoughts.

<comment><USER15> _does_ subjective experience arise from matter? By which I mean, does it exist?

I realize that seems like a completely bananas question to ask. But any theory of consciousness seems to get into absurd territory very quickly. The only proof we have that consciousness even exists is that each of us (or me, anyway, who knows what you guys are) vehemently professes to experience it. Other than that, all we seem to find is complex web of deterministic reactions.

So what if the question is wrong? When we parse "I think therefore I am", we look at "am" as the insight, but it seems to me the "I" is left undefined.

edit: I'm sorry, I jumped the gun on this a bit, you were saying it doesn't arise. But nevertheless, I'm left uncomfortable declaring something exists that we can not actually perceive from the outside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If elementary particles can't think, how can thinking arise when combinations of elementary particles are put together?

It's all well and good saying that consciousness is incompatible with evidence, but I for one perceive a great deal of consciousness. How do "scientists" address this conflict with perception? Simple: they don't.

(FWIW, I don't think elementary particles can think).

<comment><USER17> > If elementary particles can't think, how can thinking arise when > combinations of elementary particles are put together?

Where's the hurricane in a drop of water?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, i just read all that.

I've never seen trolling on such a high level before.

<comment><USER9> I suspect this is simply how many germans argue in english, with the cultural differences in expression lining up in such a way that their calm argument comes out rather angry in english.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is possibly the biggest straw-man I've ever seen set up to represent panpsychism, and I feel like I've seen a lot.

This article is beyond nonsense. The author seems to define panpsychism as the idea that a "conscious" particle would somehow affect the number of particles produced in a collision. Where she gets that definition from, I can't even begin to fathom.

Panpsychism isn't "crazy shit" we "tried long ago" and we haven't "moved on". There's currently zero solid scientific evidence for _any_ theory of consciousness, and the idea of panpsychism -- that consciousness is grounded in the physical universe rather than being an emergent property or being something supernatural -- is just as valid as any other right now. Who knows, maybe it's something like gravity that's indetectable at the atomic scale but shows up under very particular configurations at larger scales.

I don't know who this author is, but based on this post she comes across as _anything_ but scientific.

<comment><USER20> I think she's perfectly scientific.

She's also clueless about philosophy and metaphysics - which is unfortunately not that unusual among contemporary scientists.

And I don't mean philosophy in the sense of being able to debate the fine points of anything much - but in the sense of having the breadth of conceptual education to understand what's required of genuinely a rational and consistent argument, and what's actually an irrational and irrelevant appeal to authority, as this "argument" is.

This isn't particularly about panpsychism or consciousness. It's that the quality of the argument being presented is so poor.

She's drawing an identity between a taxonomy of observed behaviour and independent consciousness, and saying that any entities that can be fitted into a taxonomy can be conscious.

Which is "not even wrong."

You could just as well argue that electrons _are_ conscious because they can read our minds while we do experiments and are trolling us by creating some made-up rules they've invented which happen to look like quantum theory.

Both make as much sense, and both are equally unhelpful as rational arguments.

<comment><USER21> _You could just as well argue that electrons are conscious because they can read our minds while we do experiments and are trolling us by creating some made-up rules they 've invented which happen to look like quantum theory._

One can argue similarly to give a possible explanation for anything. It's not a question of whether it could be this way but rather what seems to be the most plausible explanation. The argument you gave above (I know it's not one you are seriously purporting) seems much less likely to be correct than the one Sabine gave.

My reading of Sabine's argument is that we get the random behavior from particle collisions you expect if quantum mechanics is correct and thus electrons aren't conscious. The particles follow randomness and not what one would think would occur if there was consciousness/free will involved. Yes, she seems to make the connection between the two concepts.

I don't know if Sabine is correct but I certainly don't think

 _Both make as much sense, and both are equally unhelpful as rational arguments._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> r/IAmVerySmart

[https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/)

<comment><USER21> She's a physicist and is addressing the notion that electrons have consciousness. She works in quantum gravity and presumably knows quite a bit about particle theory. Her blog post is solely about the idea that electrons can have consciousness and why she - an expert in physics and quantum gravity - believes this isn't possible. Since, according to her conclusions, electrons can't have consciousness then the idea that all matter has consciousness can't be correct. The logic is quite sound. I don't know if her definition of panpsychism is correct but her logic is sound.

1\. Electrons are matter.

2\. Electrons don't have consciousness. (according to her argument)

3\. Therefore the belief that all matter has consciousness is wrong.

Note that an argument can be logically sound while having a false conclusion. This happens if one of the premises are wrong. In this case it would be her conclusion that electrons can't have consciousness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Look we've been shooting these particles you call "humans" at varying targets and so far they've all acted the same way. They haven't shown any difference in how they reacted with different stars, for example. Even if we shoot them back at that cold planet where you collected them, they all interact with it the same way.

Consciousness at such small scale is simply not possible. Our theories don't allow it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Consciousness is nothing mysterious. It is the state of the human body to be aware of itself. It's independent of any organs. It has nothing to do with the heart as previously thought or with the brain as is popular now. But it can be associated with the microbiome because consciousness or self-awareness always reacts to the microbiome. The microbiome serves to consciousness the content it creates in order to lead the consciousness. The self perceives this content as the "inner voice". A cat is not aware of itself as a cat because it experiences its environment directly and not through the filter of language as humans do. During sleep conscioussness "dies" and microbes take over and do their business of repairing the body without the meddling of the consciousness. When they become hungry and they want to be fed they wake up their slave (the consciousness) and serve him beautiful images of crossants and the smell of coffee in order to get their feed which is usually sugar. This is not a physics problem and physicists should take their atomic materialist doctrines with them and get out and continue discussing the temperatures 14 billions years ago in ever greater details. Physicists can have nothing to say about the human body.</comment>


Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronswartzday.org/invite/ <comment><AUTHOR> Internet Archive announcement:

[http://blog.archive.org/2015/11/02/aaron-swartz-day- hackatho...](http://blog.archive.org/2015/11/02/aaron-swartz-day-hackathon- privacy-enabling-conference-and-reception/)</comment>


Fifa: the video game that changed football - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/21/fifa-video-game-changed-football <comment><USER2> > The best of the set used a so-called isometric camera angle, positioned as > if looking down on the pitch from one of the stadium's corners.

I remember playing the first FIFA in '94 on Mega Drive (Genesis). It was really revolutionary back then, it killed all the other soccer games overnight.

> The following year's sequel, Fifa Soccer 95 included club sides from across > eight different national leagues, including the Premier League.

That deal helped them maintain an advantage other competitors (e.g PES) for a long time, and still do in a way.</comment>


5 Reasons Why Clickbaiting Is Killing You - <AUTHOR> http://raed.tn/blog/5-reasons-why-click-baiting-is-killing-you/

<comment><USER2> Heh, the title is so meta.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to assume that this is a compliment.</comment></comment>


Android OS is similar to the Windows OS - <AUTHOR> http://ajean.net/2013/02/13/android-os-is-similar-to-windows-os/

<comment><USER2> "rooted device" == "illegal install"? Even if the rest of the comparison weren't bogus, this definitely sorted this entry into the "contains: one blog, zero clue" category.

<comment><AUTHOR> It says till the device receives support atleast. After that the manufacturer may or may not provide support.

<comment><USER2> What does that have to do with piracy?

<comment><AUTHOR> If it is illegal is it not pirated?

<comment><USER2> As opposed to using pirated Windows, rooting an Android device is not illegal; it unlocks functions not normally available (with the risk of allowing chosen apps to break out of the sandbox). How is that comparable to piracy? There is even vendor support - for example, Sony Ericsson has an _official_ page that aids in unlocking the phone's bootloader (prerequisite for rooting). There's nothing illegal in this (unless you live in some jurisdiction that explicitly outlaws phone unlocking, but that's obviously not a problem with Android), and no pirated content either.

As for the manufacturers' support, for most devices sold with Windows, it is _explicitly_ limited to the hardware - "no OS support here, call MS for that."

The author of the article is trying _too hard_ to find similarities, IMNSHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> On HTC website is also has boot unlockers, and specifically says they do not support them any further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The largest similarity to Windows is that Android has the potential to be as dominant on tablets as Windows was on PCs, and that tablets could replace many if not most PCs in business settings.</comment>


Australian Defence to move secret files out of data hub after Chinese buy-in - <AUTHOR> http://ab.co/2sHpNCY <comment><AUTHOR> The Australian Defence Department will terminate its relationship with a Sydney data centre in 2020 and move its secret files back into a government- owned hub, because a Chinese consortium bought half of the centre's parent company. Key points: Chinese consortium bought 49pc stake in data hub's parent company Defence will shift data back into government hands once contract expires Moving data could cost up to $200 million The department is preparing to spend up to $200 million on the move, despite assurances from the company, Global Switch, that its files are secure.</comment>


Got sick of configuring node apps and JavaScript libraries so wrote a tool - <AUTHOR> https://ts-engine.dev <comment><USER2> Is there any particular reason your webpage needs to be broken without cookies?</comment>


The Untouchable Economy: Why Americans Are Turning Against 'Stuff' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/the-untouchable-economy-why-americans-are-turning-against-stuff/261652/ <comment><USER2> This resonates with me. Frankly I'm tired of owning "stuff". All I really need is a place to sleep, a laptop, a tablet, a phone and clothes. I'll get limited furniture but it'll be cheap Ikea stuff that I'll simply dispose of when I move.

I don't own a TV. In fact I doubt I'll ever own a TV again. Nor do I own a big sound system. I do own a table and chairs, a sofa and a desk. All but the desk I regret.

One thing that frustrates me no end is the one-dimensional nature of the housing and construction markets.

It seems that inner cities are (generally) expensive. Places are smaller, typically older and definitely more expensive per square meter. The further you go out, the places don't tend to get much cheaper (until you're really far out). They generally just get bigger.

Take Manhattan. I live downtown in a walkup. I could live across the Hudson in Jersey City. I'd pay slightly less but I'd have a much bigger and nicer place. But what if I just want a small place? Doesn't seem to exist.

Whenever this issue comes up I'm always reminded of the line from Fight Club:

 _The things you own end up owning you._ [1]

It's totally true. I see a lot of posts (on mailing lists) from people moving to NYC. It typically starts out "I/we need a 2 bedroom apartment". Reasons vary. Sometimes it's for their "stuff". Sometimes they "need" an office. Sometimes they've simply never had smaller.

You can have that in the city but you'll be paying a fortune or living further out. The tradeoff is more apparent here than most places and it really forces people to make choices. Some cling to their stuff. Some don't.

[1]: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes>

<comment><USER3> Ikea furniture sucks. If it's what you can afford, well, it's still functional- but if you can afford better, I've come to feel like good furniture is worth some extra stress.

<comment><USER4> > Ikea furniture sucks.

Screenwriter John August says that Ikea's motto should be, "for now, it'll do".

<comment><USER5> I've owned Ikea or similar grade furniture for most of my life. It actually bothers me that I have to keep re-buying the same things over and over again. It just seems very wasteful.

Non-Ikea furniture often seems horribly overpriced. I think there is a furniture store in Mountain View that sells $1000+ shelves or coffee tables. You'd think there is a middle ground.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure there used to be! But the introduction of the bargain option heavily polarized the market.

My solution has centered around two items; taking advantage of great sales at my preferred high-quality furniture retailer, and only going with the high- quality units for specific pieces of furniture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like having stuff, stuff can be important, and enabling. The trick is having a good filter. If you just collect crap, or status items, or knick knacks, you're just going to be stressed trying to keep track of it all. If you build up a collection of stuff that lets you do things, then that's very different.

I have stuff that enables me to cook delicious meals. And I have stuff that enables me to travel. And stuff that I can use to climb mountains or hike in the wilderness. And stuff that I can use to fix things like bicycles and cars and computers.

"Stuff" can be either good or bad. Don't collect crap, but there's nothing wrong with collecting tools that you use regularly or art that you appreciate.

<comment><USER7> I think you got the point! I truly agree. Hobbies are for life, for self- esteem and usually allow us to make some money. One point I'd like to emphasize is: Having stuffs and spending some time looking for it, enables you to create some expertise knowledge and make "business", why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For fifteen years, I've been at a point in my belongings that I can pack and move out of a place in hours. Why hang onto all this stuff? Why spend on all these things we don't need? Why not be flexible?

At this point everything I own fits into my car. Everything. I've moved from city to city while telecommuting because I could and in fact, on average I move to a new city every two years if not quicker. Stuff just glues you into place and most of it is rubbish anyway, it won't make you feel any more fulfilled or complete.

I'd rather have experiences.

<comment><USER9> This works in theory, and in practice for some people, but not everyone. For example, I don't have a lot of 'stuff' but I do have a couple of hobbies that require 'stuff' like rock climbing and backpacking. My girlfriend who lives with me is an avid scrapbooker, which inherently means she will have a lot of stuff.

It's easy to not have 'stuff' if your entire life is online, but once you start to accumulate hobbies that aren't online then not having stuff gets much more difficult.

My goal is to not have stuff that doesn't serve a purpose. Nic-nacks, gifts from trips, decorations, etc.

<comment><USER10> You can put a lot of stuff in a car. I have a fair amount of snowboarding stuff for example, but it does not actually take up all that much space. Camping is probably a better example, you can have an insane amount of camping stuff or a backpack full, but quality dominates quantity.

<comment><USER9> That's true and I could fit all my camping and climbing stuff in my car, but the picture I get from people who tout "all my stuff fits in my car" philosophy is that they live in a room with no furniture, a coffee mug and their laptop. Having less stuff for the sake of having less stuff doesn't seem to really serve a purposes. Keep what you need and want and ditch the rest. Not that complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Compare this to pg's essay "Stuff": <http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html>:

 _I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars._

<comment><USER11> _I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoid stuff._

I don't know... I own on the order of thousands of books (don't have an exact number, can't be bothered to count / catalog them all), and it can be fairly inconvenient, depending on the circumstances. In my own case, I own more books than can comfortably fit in my apartment, which means one of the biggest motivations I have to rent a bigger apartment, or buy a house, is to suit my books. And since my books have long since overflowed the amount of shelf space I have available, they wind up stacked up around the place, which gives my place a cluttered feel.

Moving is also a bitch with all these books. Books can be friggin' heavy.

That said, I still _mostly_ agree with pg that books are different from random "stuff." I treasure my books (well, ok, maybe not that copy of "OLE DB Programming in C++") and figure having too many books is far less severe a sin than, say, a crack cocaine addiction.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I own more books than can comfortably fit in my apartment, which means one of the biggest motivations I have to rent a bigger apartment_

I know the feeling, but a friend showed me the Container Store's "Elfa" shelving, which is pretty easy to install and provides seven to eight individual shelves in a particular space.

You can see a picture of my setup midway down this page: [https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/january-2012-links...](https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/january-2012-links- rejection-by-literary-agents-parking-trade-offs-altucher-confidential-the- video-game-hypothesis-macbook-airs-and-more)

<comment><USER11> Cool stuff. My problem is, I don't really have more wall space for shelves. The two remaining walls that would make good candidates for shelving, I use for hanging whiteboards. :-)

That said, I _could_ get rid of some of these books... especially older tech books that aren't relevant, either because they're plain out of date, or because I've made a conscious decision to move away from that technology, or both. For example, I have a lot of older books on various Microsoft / Windows technologies like COM, DCOM, ADO, OLE, etc. Frankly, it's very unlikely I'll ever use that stuff again.

<comment><USER10> I would suggest dumping all but the very best tech books and buying them again if you actually need them. Sure, they cost's 50$ a pop, but for most tech people that's not really an issue.

<http://my.safaribooksonline.com/>

<comment><USER11> Yeah, good point. And I am (slowly) starting to transition more and more to e-books. I by dead-tree tech books much less often than I did back in, say, 2001.

> <http://my.safaribooksonline.com>

I'm definitely thinking about signing up for a Safari subscription soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hate stuff too, but fell in love with a woman that, while she isn't a materialist, tends to want the typical amount of stuff. And now that we own a home, presents tend to be tools, and they are sometimes used, sometimes not.

Frankly, I'd love to cast it off and throw it away, but I'm afraid she'd not let me, lol. I love her more than I hate stuff though.

<comment><USER13> I was living in a very, very small apartment until I got a partner. Now we are married, we have a small house with very little storage room for stuff. A slightly larger house would be nice, not for stuff, but so we could work from home without interruptions, entertain our large family and have a bit more room for tools and pets.

<comment><USER12> Our house isn't huge, something like 1300 sqft. We don't live in BFE, but it is suburbs. My dream has always been more urban, small space but within walking distance to some cool places and public transit for those that are further away.

Having an office is nice though, I don't think I could concentrate if I had to work on stuff in the living room while she watched Glee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My wife and I of this generation, but it wasn't any economic conditions that inspired our dislike of "stuff". For me it was watching our parents' generation be driven further and further into the suburbs by the process of buying stuff and needing space for that stuff.

Realizing that the _space_ for furniture and other crap costs much more than the purchase price has made a big improvement in our lives.

</comment><comment><USER15> There was an article that appeared on HN probably earlier this year about a guy who said he was a minimalist and only owned 15 things (apparently this included "toiletries" as one thing). If my clothes are one thing, then I basically own 3 things (MBA, clothes and cell phone) and it all fits in two suitcases which I take with me as I move about S. America.

Having a second suitcase on Brazilian airlines means paying a pretty penny which usually equals the cost of the flight itself. It was only yesterday that I realized that it's possible what goes in that second suitcase is not worth the second suitcase fee. Keep in mind, I've already paid 300-400US in fees for it at this point with just 3 moves.

Just because you are a minimalist doesn't mean you own the correct few items (correct for you). It's oddly easy to forget this.

</comment><comment><USER16> "But Millennials may approach the decision about how many children to have, and how to educate them, with more of a business approach. Will this cause the number of children to rise or to fall? Children are a heavy investment, especially given the cost of college these days..."

Children...an investment? Oh, I lol'd. Children aren't an investment, unless by investment you mean 'cash bonfire.'

</comment><comment><USER17> The stuff equation changes once you have kids. Cars and appartments get bigger and stuff accumulates. Luckily you can live on a lot of hand-me-downs that get handed down again but at our house there are also continuous trips to Goodwill to get rid of stuff.

<comment><USER18> I'm seeing the _when you have kids_ argument a lot in these threads. It seems to be a big assumption a in world where many don't want to or can't have kids.

Purely anecdotal, but it seems those who want kids tend to make more than one or two of them, while many do not procreate. This leaves very little incentive for living in the suburbia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We sold all of our stuff, moved out of our 5000 sq ft "McMansion" near DC and spent a year wandering the country exploring "the spaces in-between". We lived in a trailer that I could pull behind my pickup and all of our possessions fit in the back of said pickup.

It was intensely liberating. Sadly as soon as we settled down again, the stuff started acreting like barnacles. Our plan is to repeat the process on a semi- regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER20> This blurb (relative to TheAtlantic's other articles) sounds like a response to The Cheapest Generation

(Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4421897>)

<comment><USER21> The first three words of the article are a link to that article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "[Millenials have] seen home prices collapse unexpectedly, leaving millions of people with immense debts."

I have to quibble with this. Regardless of the resale value of your home, the balance on your mortgage is the same.</comment>